Abstract STEP is a project that is intended to provide industry wide descriptions of engineering systems. The result of the programme of work will be an ISO standard (ISO 10303). The main target is a set of data models written in the language EXPRESS. The SDAI (Standard Data Access Interface) defines a functional interface between an application and one or more collections of data, described using EXPRESS. The objective of this work was to enable the formal definition of the SDAI operations. This implied also providing a formal definition of a subset of EXPRESS. Not all, but the majority of the important constructs have been modelled. Many issues concerning the semantics of the SDAI, arose during the building of the specification. The salient features are discussed in some detail within the paper. Given the benefits of a formal approach, which are shown in this paper, it is proposed that the specification should be completed and added to the SDAI standard.
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